Arghblarg

Yes, I know they are update services; fair point you make, that those not technically-minded should probably leave them on.

However I personally do not appreciate OS updates, no matter their purported criticality, being installed without my express permission. I am aware of Group policies, but Win11 Home does not officially support them (though one can install gpedit.msc manually; however according to sources I researched, not all policies set will even be honoured by the Home edition).

I did consider scheduling it, just hadn’t gotten around to trying it out.

If could, I would wipe Win11 and use native Linux but this laptop is too new and support is poor on it; it’s gone as soon as practical :)

When I have to boot into Win11, I run this right after as a shortcut from my desktop (right-click and Run As Administrator):

net stop usosvc
sc config usosvc start=disabled
net stop wuauserv
sc config wuauserv start=disabled

… be sure to set your Wifi points as metered to block Update as well.

Note that anytime you go into certain Settings / Control Panel pages, Win11 silently re-enables the above services! Crazy. (Someone should really write a patch for that…)

Sad anyone has to put up with this BS but, we do what we gotta do.

Ah, good. I wonder why it isn’t used more often – this wouldn’t be such a huge problem then I would hope. (Let me guess – ‘convenience’, the archenemy of security.)

I don’t know much about NPM (having avoided JS as much as possible for my entire life), but golang seems to have a good solution: ‘vendoring’. One can choose to lock all external dependencies to local snapshots brought into a project, with no automatic updating, but with the option to manually update them when desired.

That’s what I ended up doing. A dumb monitor is just fine, as long as you don’t need a huuuge screen. The main thing is to find a good external speaker though that doesn’t auto-sleep in the middle of one’s show…

Or, please consider Devuan as well, to ensure there are distros without hard dependencies on systemd, an expansive attempt to cement IBM/RedHat’s control over the direction of Linux through foundational changes to the init, filesystem, login, homedir, and other components…

Please don’t bother replying to change my mind… never gonna like systemd no matter what. If it works for you, fine. Some of us still find it wholly unnecessary.

When our last TV which was ‘smart’ died, we just bought a big lcd monitor at the pawn shop. We already were only using Kodi on an Android box, so a monitor with external speaker is fine. (Seemed spyware free last time I checked, but beware no-name android media boxes on=from eBay etc., use a tiny or old spare PC instead if you wish).

One must ‘sail the high seas’ tovget content, of course…

You can, but now it’s called “a big monitor and your own server with a personal media library”.

Don’t let your guard down. Maybe this time they’ll fully pull the TPM/UEFI trigger and make it impossible to install any other OS on new PCs… they have lots of leverage over manufacturers to tighten the screws on the BIOS and boot process.